The Ultimate List Of Content Marketing Tools

The Ultimate List of The Best Content Marketing Tools

The best content marketing tools help save you time, improve your SEO results and in turn get more traffic to your site. With the right conversion tactics in place that means more customers.

Let’s face it content marketing is time-consuming and for that reason, many companies outsource it to other companies.

However, while that takes away the pain of content production, it can dilute your overall results. Why?

Well without a clear content strategy that aligns with your brand and your audience, you can simply end up producing lots of content but doesn’t move your business forward.

As an example, you produce content of low quality, that doesn’t engage your audience or doesn’t offer any real value. The more you do this the less engaged your audience becomes.

That’s why I’ve put together this list of the best content marketing tools. I’ll guide you through the whole process and give you some tips.

From how to come up with content ideas that will attract more customers to writing content, research tools, content creation tools and much more.

The goal is for you to write content that becomes magnetic, attracts more traffic, gets ranked with Google and ultimately grows your business.

So, read on for the ultimate list of the best content marketing tools.

The ultimate list of the best content marketing tools has been broken down into sections to help you navigate the content easily. Use the table of contents below to jump to any section of the page.

Table of Contents

Points To Consider Before Jumping To The Best Content Marketing Tools

Content Marketing Strategy

It’s easy for businesses who don’t know their audience to go down the route of publishing content they think their audience will be interested in.

research from the Content Marketing Institute found that more than 80% of marketers say they have a content marketing strategy, but only a third have documented that very same content marketing strategy. Let’s fix that.

Steps To Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy

Step 1. Determine Objectives for Content Marketing

Why are you doing this at all? What is content going to do for your business? Create awareness? Generate leads? Improve loyalty and retention?

Step 2. Identify Your Purpose

What content will set you apart? There is a glut of content on the internet. Will you be motivational, inspirational, offer advice and deliver value? What is your core value proposition?

Step 4. Define Your Audience

Understand your customers. Build your buyer personas. A great free tool for is to use Xtensio. First of all, though do your research:

  • Surveys: Ask your audience what type of blog post they enjoy reading. Offer incentives for people to take part (like the chance to win a free product) and drop the survey link in your newsletter.
  • Monitoring the industry: Use tools like Ahrefs and BuzzSumoto find top-performing content in your industry. What is your target audience reading, watching or listening to?
  • Talking to customer-facing staff: Ask your customer service teams for a list of frequently asked questions. What are they struggling with?

Simply put, a buyer persona is a detailed description of your target customer. A fully fleshed out buyer persona includes everything from demographic information to hobbies, and from career history to family size – all written as if the persona were a real person.

Part of the reason marketers fail at a content strategy is that they see their customers as data points, not as people. When you see people as data points in a spreadsheet, it’s easy to get caught up thinking that you know what they need. But until you realize that marketing is about empathy more than anything else, your copy will sound like it’s coming from a corporation. And that’s not a good thing.

Step 5. Set Your Metrics For Your Content Marketing

Your objectives dictate your metrics. If you’re trying to generate awareness, measure that. Use the right content marketing metrics that match your marketing goals.

Content Marketing Tools And Metrics

Step 6. Create a Content Execution Plan

Use the persona journey map canvas and customer conversations to determine optimal content. Where and how do your audiences consume information? Understand that, depending upon the funnel stage, customers will need different types of content. Build a plan that shows what content you’ll create daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly.

#6. Match Your Content To Different Stages of Your Marketing Funnel

Content Marketing Funnel
best content marketing tools – content plan

The Ultimate List Of The Best Content Marketing Tools

Now you have a sketched-out plan you need to have the best content marketing tools to implement it.

Content Ideas and Headlines

There are different tactics you can use to generate ideas:

  1. Use content idea generators.
  2. Check trending topics and content across social media, forums and places like Reddit and Alltop.
  3. Competitor intelligence – check out the top content of your competitors – by the number of shares and links.
  4. Research your customers and identify what questions they are asking, what terms they search on, what content they engage with.

#1. Hubspot Content Idea Generator

Content Marketing Tools For Startups

Hubspot Idea Generator tool will give you five results, so about a week’s worth of ideas.

I love it because it’s incredibly easy to use.

Literally within seconds, you’ll have five engaging blog post titles.

All you have to do is enter up to three terms in the search boxes.

#2. Portent

Portent Another Content Marketing Tools

Portent gives you a super quick way to come up with a click-worthy blog title. IT’s quick and easy to get content ideas.

#3. Answer The Public

Answer The Public Content Marketing Tools

I love the front page of Answer the Public – kinda quirky. After entering the topic you are looking to blog about, you are rewarded with lots of ways people are searching for the term. In particular, focus on the questions section.

#4. Title Generator

Title Generator A Content Marketing Tool For Startups

Another one of the best content marketing tools is Title Generator. It is another easy to use generator, where all you need do is to enter the term(s) you want to write about. You literally get hundreds of results and ideas. Not all of them will be great, but you can pick out some of the ideas that do work and discard the others.

#5. Headline Generator

Headline Generator One Of Many Content Marketing Tools

Catchy headlines are a necessity when it comes to getting eyeballs on your content. However, they aren’t always easy to come up with. That’s why this tool was created. Don’t forget to filter the titles based on clickbait, evergreen, seasonal… the selection is in the bottom left section.

#6. Sumo Headline Generator

Sumo Titile Generator

Sumo Headline Generator first asks you what type of content you want to write: listicles, how-to guides, and so on. Click on which type you want. After that, you’ll see suggestions for content ideas and you refine this further by filling in the fields on the left-hand side of your screen.

Best Content Marketing Tools – Content Discovery

#7. Feedly

Feedly For Content Curation

Instead of flicking around the internet losing time searching for content, you can way more efficient by bringing the content into one place.

Compile a list of the best blogs and content producers for your topic.

Next, grab their RSS feeds and use Feedly to curate the content.

Each time any blog publishes their content it will appear in Feedly. You only have so many hours in the day so only read the best content.

#8. Flipboard

Flipboard For Content Discovery

Flipboard is a flexible tool. You can create your own magazine, curate content and use it to spot trends.

What makes it different from Feedly is that it works more like an online magazine.

Moreover, you can create your own magazine, where you can add top content (including your own!), as well as follow magazines created by others, or keep track of all trending news of the moment.

#9. Reddit

Reddit As A Content Marketing Tools

Reddit is the number one source of viral content – articles, videos, memes, interesting stories, and many other types of content

On the Reddit main page, you can see all the top content of the moment (content is upvoted/downvoted by users, thus determining its position on the page).

However, you can also subscribe to subreddits related to your niche. You’ll be amazed and how many there are.

Almost one for everything you can think of!

Use the search bar to find active subreddits you might be interested in.

#10. Quora

Quora Content Marketing Tools For Startups

Quora is a question and answer platform. What makes it great for one thing is the number of people that participate.

You can make connections, as well as use it to drive traffic to your site.

But, you can also use Quora as a source of content ideas, because you can spot the most popular questions and keep track of top answers.

The answers provide a good level of detail that you can use to help you produce content.

Simply subscribe to different topics and find out what questions people have – it can be a great source of ideas and inspiration!

SEO Tools for Competitive Intelligence

There are lots of SEO tools you can use to gain insights into what content marketing works best for your competitor and across the industry. These are just a few of the tools I would recommend for a deep dive into content that has link value.

Don’t forget that for the most part when using SEO tools you need to still go back and create a headline that grabs peoples attention.

Take a look at other Search Marketing Tools that can help you get more links and more traffic.

#11. Ahrefs

Ahrefs Content Marketing Tools

Ahrefs is my go to tool for SEO. It is packed with features and is extremely useful to not only keep track of your own SEO but also to find content ideas.

You can see what content has high numbers of links and social shares on competitor sites.

#12. SEMRush

Content Marketing Tools The Seo Approach

SEMrush is another top quality SEO tool. SEMrush provides a complete tookit for digital marketing.

SEMrush offers data into the SEO tactics of competing brands. The solution shows you what keywords boost competitors’ search engine ranking

#13. MarketMuse

Content Marketing Tool Marketmuse

MarketMuse is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool specifically created to help people better understand content marketing and strategy. 

MarketMuse is a content planning tool that uses AI to pull data from all the top-performing websites on a particular search term.

Based on that information, it makes recommendations about how long your piece on the same topic should be as well as the relevant keywords and subtopics to include – that is gold!

#14. Moz

Moz Seo Tool For Startups

Best Content Marketing Tools – Trending Topics

Social media is barometer for what is trending.

There are hundreds of tools out there to help you do everything from measure brand sentiment to spot trends to customer service.

If you’re interested in finding out about other social media tools then check out the startups’ tools section of the site.

#15. ContentStudio.io

Content Marketing And Social Media Content.io

It is a social media management and content marketing suit. It helps individuals, marketers, and agencies to discover, schedule, post, automate, and analyze trending content in any industry.

The reason for its swift progress is adaptability. This product has shaped into a comprehensive marketing tool. Features such as social media automation, social analytics, content discovery, RSS Feed Reader, Social inbox, and countless others are combined under one roof.

No other platform in this category is offering so much functionality at a very reasonable price. This is the reason why ContentStudio will continue to see growth in 2020.

#16. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo Content Marketing Tool

Buzzsumo is another one of those tools that I talk about a lot.

Buzzsumo is influencer marketing and outreach tool, but for now, let’s focus on content research.

First of all, enter a topic, keyword or domain, and then use the filtering options to refine your search.

You’ll soon spot the most popular content and what is getting the most shares.

#17. Nuzzel

Nuzzle One Of Many Content Marketing Tools

You don’t have to work so hard to stay up-to-date on your interests and current events.

I’ve have tested many news digest services and found that Nuzzel is one of the best.

You can easily configure it to spot trends and trending news in your niche.

#18. SproutSocial

Sprput Social Keywords

Sprout social is more of a Social Media Management solution versus a content discovery solution like BuzzSumo.

Though Sprout Social doesn’t have as many features centred around content and influencer discovery, but Sprout social is a good tool to spot trending topics.

#19. Mention

Content Marketing Tools Mention

Mention doesn’t do everything BuzzSumo can do, but it is great at monitoring social media.

It’s easy to use and offers real-time monitoring and provides you with live updates from across millions of websites, social media sites, blogs, forums, and beyond.

Use hashtags as well to spot what is trending based on the common hashtags for the topic you are writing about.

Best Content Marketing Tools – Content Planning

#20. Xtensio

The Ultimate List Of The Best Content Marketing Tools
Xtensio a host of templates and tools for strategy, marketing and content

Xtensio is a collaboration tool every business or team needs to create well-presented reports, case studies, agendas or any online documents. It has an easy-to-use drag and drop functionality that enables adding and resizing of images and videos, changing backgrounds and a lot more. Changes are automatically saved and synced across all device for all users. More conveniently, it promotes brand consistency as users work under a customized dashboard.

#21. Coschedule

Content Marketing Tools Coschedule
best content marketing tools for teams

Coschedule goal is to help you stay organised and make your life easier.

It does this by integrating everything marketing-related into one place.

As an example, you can use it to plan your social media schedule, as well as your content and blog schedule.

Furthermore, you can keep track of your content schedule and hence prepare ahead for content you are going to create. In addition, it can even publish your content automatically.

#22. Trello

Trello Productivity Tool

Best Content Marketing Tools – Productivity

#23. Evernote

Best Free Tools For Startups

I’ve been using Evernote now for years and it is an indispensable tool for helping to brainstorm ideas, organise projects, take notes and keep track of ideas.

What’s more, Evernote integrates with Slack and many other applications so you can easily share your notes and projects with ease.

#24. Slack

Slack Communication And Collaboration Tool For Startups

I don’t think many people these days haven’t heard of Slack. It’s taken the world by storm and for good reason – it save on emails.

You can use Slack to collaborate and communicate with clients, your team and any other people who you work with. Plus Slack integrates with loads of other useful platforms and apps you use.

The other great productivity saving is that you can automate so much of Slack. Check out this Slack post in startup tools for more information.

#25. IFTT

Iftt One Of The Best Productivity Tools

IFTT offers tonnes of handy automations in a variety of topics, including blogging, social media and content marketing.

The way to think of IFTT is that it provides the pipes that connect lots of different platforms and the rules as to when and how they should connect and pass information.

If you’re using WordPress then you can see how easy it is to connect and automate lots of routines.

Best Content Marketing Tools – Writing

#26. Hemingway

Hemingway Writing Tools For Startups

Hemingway was named after one of the biggest and best writers of all time. It has one clear goal and that is to make you a better writer.

One of the ways it does this is to eliminate unnecessary words from your content. As a result, your content should be crisper to read, clearer and more engaging.

#27. Grammarly

Grammarly Is The Best Grammar And Spelling Checker

If you type quickly and produce a lot of content you can become a bit blind to mistakes. Even proof reading your own words can be tedious and time-consuming.

Grammarly helps you by correcting those mistakes, but the bigger piece is that you also learn as you use it the types of common mistakes you make.

Overtime, you can really improve your writing, particularly for lengthy formal documents.

#28. Readable

Readable A Content Marketing Tool

Producing good quality content is critical to success online.

Readable analyzes the readability of your content and recommends the best ways to improve upon it so that it engages your audience.

It reviews your keyword density, performs sentiment analysis, and computes the usual speaking and reading times of your content.

Readable uses different factors including sentence length, syllable count, average word length, word familiarity, and sentence complexity to show you accurate readability scores.

Best Content Marketing Tools – Visual Content

#29. Crello

Crello A Design Tool

If you create content for marketing purposes, adding visuals will make it a lot more engaging and informative. Why?

Our brain processes images about 60 thousand times faster than text, and that means that visual information has better chances to grab your potential or current customers’ attention.

Crello is your simple solution for creating stunning visuals for social media, blogs, presentations, cards, eBooks and printed materials.

#30. Venngage

Venngage Visual Content And Design Tool

Venngage is a brilliant infographic design platform that makes it easy to create stunning graphs, infographics, and charts easily.

It provides a vast array of easy exporting options, clipart, icon, customizable templates and themes, free-form design canvas, and it has a simple drag and drop interface.

Infographics are great for building backlinks to your site. Simply do some research on your niche and turn any data into a useful infographic. Pin it on Pinterest and share to your other social media channels.

#31. Vyond

Video Marketing Tools For Marketers

Use Vyond video platform to increase content and inbound marketing conversions.

Create and share unique and compelling video content to any of the major social media networks.

The bottom line with Vyond is that it enables users to differentiate themselves from the pack. When people differentiate themselves from the pack, it gives them a distinct advantage.

And, when people have a distinct advantage, it typically relates to increased revenues and higher profit margins… this is why it’s important to use video.

#32. Promo

Promo The Video Editing And Production Tool For Startups

Promo is a service introduced by Slidely. Use it to create beautiful videos, with their library of videos and licensed music, and add your logo and text to fully customize the results.

#33. Wave

Wave Viceo Editing Content Marketing Tool

Want to create beautiful videos without actually having to shoot any footage yourself? Good news – there are tools that can help you do just that.

Wave is a ‘social video maker’ that I’ve started using recently and love it.

It’s incredibly easy to use and you don’t need any design/video editing experience. They also have millions of video clips and images that you can add to your design.

Plus, you can watermark your videos, add text, edit your videos as you wish, add music from their library of royalty-free music and optimise your video formats for different platforms and devices.

#34. Lumen5

Lumen5 is online video maker designed to help you easily create engaging social content. The focus of the platform is to allow anyone without training or experience to easily create engaging video content within minutes.

#35. Qzzr

Qzzr The Way To Engage Your Customers And Understand Them

What I like about Qzzr is that they make it easy to create interactive content for your customers.

A simple quiz can help you dig deeper into what your customers want and are looking for – but you can make it fun and interactive.

Quizzes are easy to create, customizable, and can easily be embedded on your website.

Quizzes are a powerful way to capture emails and provide give a valuable boost to your email building list.

#36. Engageform

Engageform The Quiz Way To Build And Email List

Engageform is a super intuitive tool to create quizzes, surveys, and polls. The platform offers an impressive array of visual customization options to make your content really stand out.

You can also easily embed and share your quiz, survey, or poll on your website or social media. Once people start interacting, you’ll get detailed reports of audience feedback, stats, and lead information.

Create the kind of interactive content that makes sense for your business, including personality quizzes, TV show polls, hotel ratings, knowledge quizzes, satisfaction surveys, and more.

Website SEO

#37. Yoast SEO

Yoast As One Of The Best Content Marketing Tools

Best Content Marketing Tools – Content Promotion

#38. Quuu Promote

Quuu Promote Social Media Tool

Another very useful tool that will help you get a big increase in shares and traffic, is QuuuPromote.

All you have to do is add social media updates with links to your content, and they will be shared out to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

#39. Triberr

Triberr Content Marketing Tools

Triberr sends over 2 million visits every month to the member blogs.

2 MILLION!

And these are not big blogs either.

Triberr is built for startups and bloggers, which is more or less 99% of blogs in the blogosphere – blogs that previously got little or no website traffic.

A tribe is a group of people, typically bloggers, who write about the same topics.

After you’ve interacted with the tribe through sharing, commenting and engaging with members, the Chief may decide to invite you to become a full tribe member.

As a full member, your posts will appear in the Tribal Stream of other tribe members for them to share, comment and engage with.

Alternatively, you can start your own Tribe.

#40. Outbrain

Outbrain Content Marketing Tools

Outbrain is the world’s largest content discovery platform that aims to deliver and promote personalized, relevant online, mobile, and video content to audiences.

As a platform, it helps bring publishers and marketers together. Through Amplify, Outbrain helps you reach an engaged audience through a flexible, pay-per-click model and grow traffic to articles, blog, and your mobile-optimized or video content. 

#41. Sniply

Sniply A Content Marketin Gtool That Create Smart Links

Sniply is a marketing tool that can help you drive conversions with every link you share.

Using Sniply, your customized message appears on any piece of content, whether it’s your latest blog post or an article you liked from the New York Times.

With each “snip” you can create a call-to-action moment on any piece of published content you share online.

#42. Pocket

Free Startup Tools For Social Media Pocket Bookmarking.

As you are browsing content or doing general research you might want to keep a note of interesting information for the future.

This is where Pocket comes in. Use it to save any kinds of content, either from your browser, from Twitter or from most anywhere else online, so you can read and review later.

Pocket works across mobile and desktop so you access saved items.

#43. Facebook Ads

If you post your content onto your Facebook page you can give it a boost. Alternatively use Facebook ads to promote your content to your target audience.

This can be a low-cost way of getting lots of new potential customers to engage with your content.

Content Metrics and Tracking

#44. Simplereach

Simplereach The Content Roi Tool

Simplereach is a tool designed for marketers and publishers, to help them drive better content ROI.

Basically, it’s a tool that can help you make better decisions, based on content data. You can then make better data-driven decisions about what content to create.

#45. Google Analytics

Google Analytics Tool

Google Analytics is a required tool for anybody that is going to develop a business online. However, although you will need it for a variety of different reasons, campaigns…you can also integrate it into other dashboards and systems.

Google Analytics will help you understand your audience, focus on how people interact with your blog/website and much more.

If you want to learn more take the free lessons from Google their Google Analytics Academy.

#46. Cyfe

Cyfe Analytics Tool

Cyfe has a huge array of pre-built widgets that allow you to integrate data from lots of different services to create your own custom business dashboard.

This includes Google Analytics and most CRM systems as well as other analytics tools. You can use Cyfe to track your content marketing metrics and easily spot ways to improve.

Summary of the Best Content Marketing Tools

These are the best content marketing tools that I use, but if you come across others then let me know. Marketing technology is constantly changing and with Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming more integrated into tools the landscape is going to change a lot. New tools and technologies will disrupt the market.

Blank Form (#4)

Innovation is happening faster than ever, keep up with new ideas, tools and technologies.

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